Thursday, 28 June 2012

Urchfont Manor is being sold by Wiltshire County Council and the adult education it has provided since 1946 will finish at the end of the summer. An embroidery group – the Stitched Textile Artists who meet there three times a year - have set up a small textile trail to encourage you to look round the grounds and to celebrate the wonderful times we have had at Urchfont Manor over the years. If you are able to make a visit or have enrolled on this year’s Distant Stitch Summer School, you might like to look out for some of these and others as you stroll around. We hope they will all be visible when you visit.

Monday, 18 June 2012

Ronnie has resolved two super pieces of work using fabrics made at Jo’s workshop. I don’t know if my photographs have done justice to the lovely mix of colours and stitch detail. They are approximately 25/30 by 65/70 cms.

Thursday, 14 June 2012

Well here it is – the large scale digital prints on silk chiffon of one of my stitched drawings. ‘Fingerprint’ (www.fingerprintfabric.com) made four identical prints for me – each figure about 130 high. Now to pluck up courage and to cut it into strips. I’ve bought myself a new fabric cutting scissors and can think of no other excuse not to start cutting!

A painted fabric (water resist on calico) made with Jo Budd – just above the machine - has been used as a ground for figures printed strips of vellum.

Friday, 8 June 2012

Fragments of relief panels in Pompeii – the lettering is low relief – carved into the surface and the scrolling pattern is high relief which is built up from the surface. I also love the pattern in the background.

A woven piece of strips cut from each of my resist trial samples – before they were washed out.

See a row of the washed out samples in the previous posting.

The image below is entitled ‘The Greater Knit’. It was knitted from a piece of A4 paper as a response to an idea by the director of a local gallery. He sent local artists each a small piece of paper and asked us to respond in a personal way to the theme of ‘Local Wildlife’. As you can imagine, mine was exhibited in amongst a range of landscape water colours, although someone did a beautiful piece of origami – another textile artist of course! Do you think that textile people are more able to ‘think outside the box’?

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

My Jubilee weekend was spent working with the Textile Study Group at Hawkwood College with our guest tutor, Jo Budd.

Jo is a super tutor and transformed the bare hall at Hawkwood into an industrious and inspiring working studio.We worked on a several different resist methods (emulsion paint, binders, manutex) of decorating fabrics. Needless to say I produced a lot of different fabrics but few resolved pieces as time ran out on this busy workshop.

Initially we tested all the media and methods and I was cruelly teased for my strict and methodical way of making my trial samples seen below, placed in sequence. I made the marks by scraping a notched edge of credit card and trialled different fabrics ranging from scrim and fine silk to chunky silk hessian, using the same pattern of marks.

Jo also showed us interesting ways of resisting dyes using just water.

We then selected from our range of fabrics and made a few tentative compositions. The composition below is painted silk habotai and silk hessian.

Jo is an experienced artist who uses textiles to make very large scale pieces and also tiny miniatures. This one ‘Blue Boat (Cry Dock II)’ is 245 x 345 cm. I first saw this piece in ‘Art of the Stitch’ at the Commonwealth Institute Embroiderers’ Guild exhibition in the 1980’s. It was quite a ground-breaking piece for its scale as well as the painterly way in which Jo applies colours to her fabrics and the lack of decorative stitch, although she assured us that all her fabric pieces are hand stitched around the edges and no bonding methods are used. http://www.jobudd.com/